Charles Forceville was born in Heemstede, NL, in 1959. He studied English at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where after graduating he taught in the English, comparative literature, and Word & Image departments. From 1996-1998 he did a post-doc "Narration in Fiction and Film" at the University of Leyden. Currently he works in the Media Studies department of the Universiteit van Amsterdam, where he is associate professor. He serves as member of the advisory boards of Metaphor and Symbol , Journal of Pragmatics , Public Journal of Semiotics, Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, and the Benjamins series Review of Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistic Studies of Language and Cognition in Cultural Contexts. Forceville was programme director of the Research Master Media Studies from 2004-2012 and chairs the ACLC project AIM/Structure & Rhetoric in Multimodal Discourse (see the "Adventures in Multimodality"/AIM blog at http://muldisc.wordpress.com/) . From 2005-2008 he was external examiner of the MPhil Text and Visual Studies (TVS) at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Apart from publishing scholarly articles and book chapters, he wrote some 200 reviews of English-language fiction for the Dutch national newspaper Trouw (1987-2007). The volume Multimodal Metaphor (Mouton De Gruyter), co-edited with Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, appeared in September 2009. In 2008 he was given the opportunity, together with Kurt Feyaerts and Tony Veale, to spend six months as visiting fellow at VLAC (Vlaamse Academie/Royal Flemish Academy) in Brussels, Belgium, to work on the project The Agile Mind: Creativity in Models and Multimodal Discourse. An edited volume on the topic appeared in 2013 with Mouton de Gruyter. 2017 saw the publication of Tseronis, Assimakis, and Charles Forceville, eds (2017). Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres, edited by Assimakis Tseronis and Charles Forceville (Amsterdam: Benjamins).

Forceville spent a sabbatical at the university of Lund, Sweden (hosted by Carita Paradis) in the autumn of 2014, to work on a monograph showing how relevance theory can be applied to mass-communicative visuals; this work is still in progress. From September to December 2017, he was honorary/visiting professor at the Universidad Autónoma Madrid (UAM), hosted by Laura Hidalgo-Downing. He there started adapting his online Course on Pictorial and Multimodal Metaphor for publication as a book.

Forceville regularly uploads pre-prints of papers and chapters on his Academia.edu and Researchgate.net and Academia.edu profiles; the latter also has a full CV.

Scholarly background and beliefs

"Educated in a literature and linguistics department, I thrived on a passion for literature. But gradually I found the activity of interpreting literary works, while an enjoyable and important pursuit, no longer satisfied my scholarly ambitions. Adopting the Cognitive Linguistics' work on metaphor I developed a model of pictorial metaphor ( Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising, Routledge 1996). Since my appointment as lecturer and researcher in Media Studies, my research has broadened from pictorial metaphor to multimodal metaphor, from static representations to moving images, and from advertising to other popular art forms, such as comics and animation. Moreover, my work onmultimodal metaphor proved fertile ground for transforming into a multimodality scholar tout court.

While I see text-based analyses of contemporary representations (literature, advertising, comics, cartoons, logo’s and pictograms, film) as basic to my scholarly work, my goal, in the broadest sense, is to contribute to cognitivist theories accounting for the interpretation and evaluation of visuals and of multimodal discourses. I strive to make my work both theoretically insightful and practically applicable and attempt to formulate my findings in such a way as to enable verification and falsification as well as to provide starting points for empirical testing. I consider it crucial to demonstrate that humanities-oriented research focusing on art and popular culture is of interest to work that is being done in the social sciences – and vice versa. In my view, sociobiology offers excellent opportunities for further researching ‘gene-culture co-evolution.’ Relevance Theory and narratology profoundly influence my scholarly work. In recent years I have also become more interested in investigating how theory can inform education and practice, for instance via several short animation films that HKU students have made at my instigation and partial supervision."

15-23/3/13 Visiting scholar at University of Granada, Dept. of English and German philology, Spain. Participation in course "Pragmatic processes in utterance interpretation: metaphor, a case in point" + lecture to BA students (Course: "Critical Discourse Analysis") + presentation in mini-symposium on multimodal discourse + work on research (org. Belén Soria Clivillés and Encarnacio Hidalgo Tenorio ).

March/Apr 12 Visiting scholar at Granada University, Dept. of English and German philology, Spain (org. Belén Soria). Participation in teaching programme, workshop on multimodal discourse, and work on research.

19-23/4/10 Three invited talks at symposium with representatives from various partner universities, celebrating the merger of Växjö University and the University of Kalmar into Linnaeus University (LnU), Sweden (org. Charlotte Hommerberg). Unable to attend because of Icelandic vulcano eruption.

25-29/3/04 Invited talk "Cultural factors in the interpretation of multimedial metaphor." Semioticis and the Humanities (International Congress jointly organized by Chinese Association of Social Sciences (CASS) and the International Association of Semiotic Studies (IASS), Beijing, China.

22-2/02 "Visual representations of the Idealized Cognitive Modelof ANGER in comics." Conference Social Cognition and Verbal Communication: Cultural Narratives, Linguistic Identities and Applied Argumentation in a Period of Social Transition" (Dutch-Hungarian Conference on Crosscultural Linguistics and Intercultural Communication), University of Pécs (PTE), Hungary (invited paper).